On the banks of a meandering river in Colorado

Mike near the headwaters.

This photo appeared on a new post on my publisher's web site. Not sure where it was captured but I do thank M.L. Liebler and his staff at Ridgeway Press for finding it. I was just reading about this stretch of the river in Witness to Water: One Photographer's Mission to Defend the Colorado River by Peter McBride. He and his experienced waterman friend kayaked the river from the Continental Divide to the muddy goo at its mouth in Mexico. I never kayaked it. I did camp by it and hike by it and skip rocks on it and, stashed snugly in my sleeping bag, listen to its soothing sounds.

I camped many times at Timber Creek campground in RMNP. It used to be a first come-first served campground but might not be any more. You could cruise up from Denver, travel over Trail Ridge Road, and still find a place to camp at dusk. We also liked the Long's Peak site. Because it was the jumping-off point for climbers of Long's Peak, I sometimes was awakened at 2 a.m.by the shuffle of Raichle boots on gravel as climbers moved out to be up and down the peak before afternoon storms. One thing you learn in Colorado is that hikers best be up and starting down the peaks by noon to avoid the daily lightning barrage. This was brought home when I read Denver Post headlines yesterday about a teen that was struck and killed and four others injured by lightning on the summit of Mount Blue Sky (formerly Mt. Evans). 

I love my birthplace of Colorado. I just could not figure out a way to stay there. I lived there through birth and part of fourth grade and then Dad's jobs took him to Washington state and Kansas and back to Denver and then on to Florida. I attended school in four different states from fourth through eighth grades. Educators would tell you those are crucial years in a kid's development. All that disruption could lead to a career as a writer or worse. That's exactly what happened. 

I returned to Colorado for work after I graduated from University of Florida and applied to every newspaper in Florida with no results. I met a girl (THE GIRL, as it turned out) who grew up in Africa, Europe, and Georgia (the state). We decided to traipse off together, and found gainful employment in Denver, 1978-88, and then grad school at CSU in Fort Collins, and finally found a career as an arts administrator and editor in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Now I'm back in coastal Florida.

I am glad for my 23 years in Colorado and 33 in Wyoming. Both states are in my blood that now, on summer afternoons, moves turgidly like that sticky mess at the poor dying Colorado River which no longer reaches the ocean.

Wish me luck.

Watching The Longest Day with my wife

My wife Christine didn't see The Longest Day when it premiered in 1962. She still hadn’t seen it 64 years later. She watched it with me last night because the World War Two docuseries with Tom Hanks had incited her curiosity.

I did see The Longest Day in a movie theater in November or December 1962. My father took me, my brother Dan, and some of our friends to see the blockbuster either for Dan's birthday (Nov. 25) or mine (Dec. 18). Or maybe it was both birthdays since the two dates were close (as were Dan and I) and it got us out of the crowded house. Dan was turning 10; 12 for me.

I have seen the movie a half-dozen times since.  I loved it as a kid and hated it as a young man and now feel nothing but nostalgia for it. Almost all of the cast is long gone. Normandy is now a tourist draw. But, during that one moment in history, it was the center of turmoil.

Chris doesn’t watch war movies. The violence disturbs her, as it should, and she gets sidetracked due to her ADHD. When I was a lad, the details of World War Two were important. My father was a veteran as were many fathers of the time. His basement den was filled with war souvenirs, medals, photos. His parents had saved every Life magazine from early 1942 until spring of ’46 when he finally arrived home. I devoured those magazines, mostly for the war coverage. I no longer have them but they are readily available online and at your local library. They’re a treasure trove of photos and news stories and period ads for cigarettes (many cigarettes) and toothpaste -- lots of brushing to banish that two-pack-a-day habit.

Chris grew up overseas with her U.S. Army lifer dad, Jack. Their family lived on military bases from Ethiopia to Germany, Virginia to Georgia. By the time her father  retired, he had three wars worth of stories and the crusty demeanor of a Chief Warrant Officer. He and my father belonged to the same Knights of Columbus chapter. We were not introduced by them. That’s a whole other story.

I don’t know exactly what she felt while we watched. She was only two feet away in her recliner (a match to mine) but with a whole different set of experiences. Now we share those experiences, and have for almost 50 years. But we bring our own selves to each shared experience.

I have seen the movie many times. There are almost no plot surprises. They came, they saw, they conquered. Some new things happened though. The segments showing the German side were the most interesting. Will Der Fuehrer be awakened from his sleeping-pill-induced sleep to release the Panzers? Only Hitler can summon the Panzers due to his paranoia and need for control. Waking him is verboten, risky too. So his very experienced generals are at a loss and will lose, but not right away. The soundtrack also got my attention. The theme song played in the background on several occasions as did the dot-dot-dot-dash of “V for Victory.” And marching band snare drums announced the German scenes. Damn, here come the Nazis! Attention!

Chris was impressed with the scale of the battle and enjoyed some of the quirky scenes, like the last vignette with downed RAF pilot Richard Burton and Airborne paratrooper Richard Beymer marveling at the dead Nazi who had put his boots on the wrong feet. Also, the cricket clickers that the paratroopers carried to sound out who was friend or foe. 

It was clear that John Wayne and Henry Fonda had to get in the most scenes – their stars still shone brightly. Sean Connery was in some crucial scenes on the British beachheads. Comic relief, as when he when he hears the Scottish army piper and says that “only the Irish can play the pipes.” Connery was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and did his first stage play (South Pacific) in London. And then Bond, James Bond. Dr. No with Connery premiered in October 1962 in London. As Dan and I watched him cracking wise on the beaches, Connery was already getting famous in Dr. No in its U.S. debut in May of ’63.

I bring all my years to anything I see and hear and read. Chris does too. I can continue retirement without watching The Longest Day again. I think of viewers of the future watching it. In what form of media will they see it? What will they think of the generations who lived in the mid-to-late years of the 20^th century? I hope they are not cursing us. I hope to see that we were striving too, that we spent time with our loved ones while it thundered outside.

Time to take a long look at the "Local Authors" section in the public library

Just a small slice of the Local Authors section

The photo shows just a slice of what awaits readers in the Ormond Beach Public Library's Local Authors section. Some of these writers have a long tenure in the area. Some are sort-of newcomers, former residents and library patrons who moved on to other jobs in other places but returned to the area recently.

I am one of the latter. 

Pleased to be here. In 1964, my father moved us from Denver to Central Florida to use his fine accountant’s skills to achieve what JFK said in '61: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade."

This wasn’t our family's first move. Our tribe had wandered the West while Dad double-checked the figures on nuclear missiles that lurked in many silos. I was set to enroll in my third school in my third state (KS, CO, FL) in one year. I attended Our Lady of Lourdes eighth grade then moved on to four years at Father Lopez Catholic High School, the old campus that's now a weedy vacant lot at Mason and Nova in Daytona.

After a few years at a non-Florida university and traveling, I returned to Daytona and graduated from DBCC (Daytona State) and earned an English degree from UF where I first took my writing seriously. Then I lit out for the territories.

It takes time, this writing biz. Some times you're an overnight sensation. Other times it takes decades until you publish your first novel. That's me -- 75 when The Ridgeway Press of Michigan published my first novel, "Zeppelins Over Denver," now available for free on the shelves of your local library. Ridgeway is a small press so it doesn’t feature on-line shopping. You can buy a copy on Venmo (see the sidebar, find @hummingbird-minds) or Amazon or your local bookstore. It's your choice. You can write me a check and I will sign the book, put it in a plain manila envelope, and take it to the local P.O. 

"Zeppelins" joins my first book of stories, "The Weight of a Body," on the Local Authors section. Select "Weight,” settle into one of the comfy chairs, and read a story inspired by my formative years in Daytona. It's called "Raymond Custy's Garden of Worldly Delights." It is set in the 1960s beach town of Tomoka Beach which is located near Daytona. It may or may not be based on real-life characters. You just never can tell with fiction. 

First up on my To-Do List: Find my Photo Idaho

My podiatrist sent an e-reminder to my Pixel. I have an appointment tomorrow where the techs cut my toenails I can't reach and the doctor comes in and gets an update on the state of my feet. Footcare is important to the elderly, even if your walking time is limited due to not being able to walk on your own and sometimes roam around on an e-scooter. 

The e-reminder asked me something I hadn't heard before. "Please bring your Photo Idaho." 

I like ID almost as much as I like WY, MT, CO, and UT. I was born in CO, spent 33 years working in WY, ands have traveled extensively in UT and MT. But no physician's e-assistant has ever asked me for my Photo Montana. 

This AI-generated message may have been powered by big Artificial Intelligence barns they've been building around the West, the ones bringing so much prosperity to small towns, even fairly big spots like Cheyenne, WY, the capital city, where I once worked. I hear that Microsoft wants to build a huge AI barn in Cheyenne with promises it will not slurp up all the snow melt and will provide a gazillion good-paying jobs. 

Before tomorrow, I will have to find my Photo ID. First stop, the potato cellar. Must be down there with the spuds.

In the mood for a Bulgarian gardening book?

I stumbled upon Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov. His latest book is “Death of the Gardener.” I’d been reading books about gardens. First, I listened to the memoir “In Kiltumpur: A Year in an Irish Garden” by Niall Williams and Christine Breen. Then I read on Kindle “First waiting for the impending frost on a North Carolina garden. It features an Frost,” which is a magical-realist YA romance by Sarah Addison Allen about apple tree that blossoms in winter and throws its apples at people he/she/it doesn’t like. Allen also wrote “Garden Spells” which is on my list of Books I Discovered On Kindle That Surprised The Heck Out Of Me (BIDONKTSTHOOM). Allen’s new book will be out in the fall. She writes on her web site that she’s been battling cancer. Cancer comes into a household and changes everything.

Gardening is more than a metaphor for me. I am, or was, a gardener, with Sungold tomatoes and pole beans out back and petunias and four o’clocks in the front. I once tripped and fell head-first into the front garden. It was getting toward autumn and I might have been there until the first frost arrived if the local preacher hadn’t been walking his dog nearby. He is a small man, a cardiac patient too small rescue me from the garden. He roused my tiny wife and she roused our burly neighbor Marco and they set me upright on the porch. My wife asked the obvious question: “What were you doing?” My reply was typical: “Getting a closer look at the coneflowers.” At the time, she was undergoing chemo for breast cancer. She needed a laugh, or so I thought.

But back to Gospodinov’s book. It’s magnificent. A short book about the death of his father the gardener in the town of Y is Bulgaria. It is rich with empathy and sadness but laced with humor. Wit, you might say, humor that doesn’t call attention to itself. The best writers have the gift.

I cried, though, as his father faded away. G is unrelenting of the portrait of his father, a young man who went to the Balkan War and then was a failed entrepreneur and then an aging magnificent gardener at his modest house in Y. The writer gets me to care so much for this simple human who lived a dynamic family life despite his many failures during life under the Bulgarian commissars. There’s no pity here just plenty of attempts to understand. The writer attaches no blame to his father’s stern ways. Most importantly, there is no exploration of how this complicated man completely fucked up his life. You know, those Tales of a Dysfunctional Family that once filled the U.S. book charts.

There are plenty of those in the U.S. In my 21 years of writing and blogging, I may have written some. I apologize, Dad and Mom, as I had yet to have the grumpy wisdom of an aging father.

What does it take to write like Gospodinov of Bulgaria  and Williams of Ireland? I had to write a million words before I had the skills to write with any sort of wit and wisdom. Just to understand what propels their writing took me seven-and-half decades. I am so sad sometimes about my status as a disabled old man, a man who survived a widowmaker heart attack at 62 and a bout with septicemia at 73. A few months after I fell into the petunias, I underwent a spinal fusion that was supposed to help me walk again but did not. I still require a walker or scooter to get around. Poor pitiful me, as the ironic Warren Zevon song goes. Woe, woe, woe is me.

As I read Gospodinov, I kept thinking of my family members, ones that I had criticized in my mind and in print, usually in fiction. The fog began to clear. I thought about the richness of people’s lives, the sorrows and the joys.  Why are we what we are and what imprint do we leave? What can I write about that only I can grasp? My purview is mine alone.

I ponder all of these things. And write.

Gospodinov’s appreciation of his parents’ generation was summed up in James Woods’ New Yorker review of the book (11/10/25 issue):

In 2023, [Gospodinov’s novel] Time Shelter won the International Booker Prize. In the new book, that good fortune is autofictionally transformed into this: “In May the novel I had dedicated to my mother and father won a big prize. On that London night, one of those few quickly jotted-down phrases in English was about the two of them, now quietly crying with joy in a little south-eastern town, I said, ‘Indeed, our pretty phrases stand upon their stooped shoulders.’” 

Stooped shoulders? That’s on my mind as I write today.

Irish Catholics have been holding the line against Nativists for a long time

I read some Irish-American history this morning on Michael Fox's Substack. "The Irish Catholic 'Rock of Erin' that held the line at Gettysburg" tells this story: 

"The Irish Catholic immigrants who defeated Pickett's Charge and held the Union line at Gettysburg were the same people American nativists were burning out of their churches and deporting as paupers."

This speaks of the earlier iteration of MAGA as the Nativists of the Know-Nothing Party. A well-written account by Fox that I haven't fact-checked but will in due time. It's a rousing tale, made me proud to come from a long line of Irish-Catholics from Roscommon and elsewhere. I've been blogging about the Know-Nothings past and present for awhile now and Trump has added fuel to their fire that never went out just went underground like those fires that burn in old Pennsylvania coal fields. 

Read it yourself. A good way to celebrate this Fourth of July weekend that belongs to all of us.

In case you missed it, June was Nuclear Family Month but just in Tennessee

Amongst all of the semiquincentennial bashes in June, the big beautiful Algae Deflecting Pool hoopla in D.C., the U.S./Israel vs. Iran matchup in the Persian Gulf, and big FIFA goings-on across the norteamericano continent, I missed an important announcement.

June was Nuclear Family Month. So said the Tennessee Legislature, the GOP part. Irked by all the nonsense about Pride Month, the LGBTQ+ Pride Parades and the colorful Pride crosswalks (the ones that goon squads paint over in the dead of night), I neglected to celebrate my nuclear family.

According to the Tennessee Lege, lawmakers of a certain stripe signed off on a resolution that says “one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or fostered children” are “God’s design.”

According to a June 6 article by Anita Wadhwani I just read in the Tennessee Lookout, Tenn. Gov. Bill Lee signed the bill in April and it carries no punch to ban anything with rainbows or men wearing eye shadow. It carries the “symbolic weight” of a “government endorsement of only one type of family unit despite a wide diversity of families living in Tennessee including single-parent, grandparent, and LGBTQ+ families,” wrote Wadhwani.

Should Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis decide on something similar, he will have a big problem. Not with me but with thousands of others. I know DeSantis works overtime to please Bubba and Bubbette voters. Mr. Harvard Grad posits himself as one of them. But right now he’s busy executing a backlog of criminals in the state prison system. His Alligator Alcatraz did not go over well and he’s mightily pissed. Rumor has it that he plans to make every Floridian walk around with the “Welcome to the Free State of Florida” banner tattooed on their foreheads. Might look nice on some people.

But GOP state governors have nothing to fear from me. I happen to have a nuclear family right here in the wildlands of Tomoka Station, Fla. One husband (me), one wife (my wife), one son (son) and one daughter (daughter). We can check those boxes. I also come from a nuclear family with the appropriate credentials. My grandparents were all Nuke Family types and so were my descendants going back a century or two possibly all the way back to Adam and Eve if there were such a nuclear pair that parented sons Cain and Abel. Cain slew Abel, becoming the first murderer featured in The Good Book that the Christian Right demands students read instead of Fahrenheit 451.

It’s now early July and I haven’t seen any statistics what the Tennessee bill has wrought. Not much, I suspect. Christian Nationalist blowhards are just that, their efforts filled with much sound and fury, signifying nothing. They hurt people, the ones they hate, with a furor that brought us Trump and the likes of Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem. Haters.

BTW, “nuclear family” is an odd term. My father built silos for nuclear missiles in the West. I lived 33 years next to the biggest nuke base in the U.S. I have strontium-90 from 1950s nuclear tests in my bones. There are lunatics out there with nuclear capability. There have been nuke plant meltdowns in Ukraine and Japan and the U.S. to contemplate.

Nuclear is nothing to imitate.